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Dick Cheney Is Cool With Gay Marriage. So What?

Dick Cheney is downright chatty these days. On Monday, Mr. C spoke at the National Press Club and had some interesting things to say about everything from his beloved 9/11 to waterboarding to his gay daughter. He even defended the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. He said that he has not seen any evidence that Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11 but added that it’s an absolute fact that Iraq was a “terrorist sponsoring state.” He said that waterboarding was used as an interrogation tactic but that it wasn’t torture and that it was well done. He also said that, had he to do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing. This is the rock-steady leadership that was the hallmark of the Bush years. Public opinion, polls, Congress all be damned—onward to security! No-bid contracts, missing billions of dollars, death, and permanent injury are just the cost of peace and prosperity.

There’s nothing new about any of the things Mr. Cheney said at the National Press Club—it’s vintage Chenese. However, some things he said are just so exasperatingly irresponsible, dismissive and false, that I wonder if he thinks no one is checking out the details.I found this quote of Mr. Cheney’s from his speech on the Swamppolitics.com site:

The prime source of information on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda was [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet. There was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That’s not something I made up… That’s something the director of the CIA was telling us.

Tenet is thrown upon the sword yet again. I have no sympathy for that guy, but it’s lame for Mr. Cheney to lay it all on George Tenet and the C.I.A., an agency that Cheney treated like a beater car for eight years.

Henry, we know all this stuff. Your point is … ?

My point is that Mr. Cheney and the administration he served are trying to excuse their deplorable and illegal actions by the most irresponsible means. Torture is not torture because your lawyers said so? Detainees are not prisoners of war and the Geneva Conventions do not apply because the same lawyers were able to parse some words and change some punctuation? Information cherry-picked by a C.I.A. that was shoved around to come up with something to justify the pre-planned schedule is what you use as the reason to start a war that will kill thousands? No, it’s not. Beyond the outrageous disingenuousness of all this is just how glaringly false some of his statements are and how desperate he is to have you believe them.

That Mr. Cheney will walk out to a podium in say these things, when he of all people knows different, is incredible. More incredible still is that he can hold an audience of literate adults with this bilge and not have anyone call him out.

Of all the things Mr. Cheney said at National Press Club, it’s his statement about gay marriage and his gay daughter that will get all the notice. Mr. Cheney seems to be O.K. with same sex marriage being a state issue and to believe that people should be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. So what? That’s elementary, as far as I’m concerned. That’s about as prerequisite for any American as being against slavery.

Forget Yoo, Addington, Gonzales, and all the other architects of America’s darkest chapter; it’s Dick Cheney who is at the beginning and end of it. Everyone else was just a character actor from central casting.